Josue Sierra

I’m an avid user of LinkedIn, and today I saw a question that caught my attention and interest — enough so that I wrote up some thoughts and ideas.

The question is:
What are effective methods for raising money for charity in an event or adventure-driven manner?

I’m currently on a solo, round the world motorcycle trip for charity. I am raising money for the Alzheimer’s Association, the Pulmonary Fibrosis foundation, and RAINN. Currently I have a website setup for blogging and displaying pictures from my travels. I’m looking for ways to use that site and my trip to raise money for the 3 aforementioned organizations. I’m looking for ideas like allowing those who donate to use my pictures for commercial use, hiring myself out for travel journalism, charging admission to slideshows after the trip has concluded, etc.

The site is viewable at:

http://www.bylandandsea.org

Several other LinkedIn users provided some good ideas and suggestions, but I didn’t see anyone mention Facebook Causes, as well as some other viral marketing resources available out there. Here was my answer:

You have a lot of important and valuable insight in the other responses above, but one idea I didn’t see is for you to set up a Facebook page and a Facebook Cause page. Facebook Causes already allows you to collect funds for charity, and with a facebook page, you can provide a viral tool for people to let other friends know about your charity fund raising efforts.

Its a great place to upload pictures, updated, and link to your blog — as well as to the charity sites and donation pages.

Related to that, make sure to ad a “tell a friend” or “email this page to a friend” tool. You want to empower those supporters that already believe in you and make it easy for them to recruit more donors and supporters for you.

The YouTube video clips idea is a great suggestion — I’ll add another tip. Use Flickr to upload pictures of people you meeet, place you visit, etc. Keep a sort of “picture blog” on Flickr. The power of Flickr is that it has viral elements to it which allow current supporters to spread the word.

All these things, by the way, should include links back to your main blog and donation pages. This will all help increase your organic search engine rankings, which in turn can make your web efforts more visible and easier to find.

Marketnig Vox is reporting that Boston-based Modernista dismantled their site, and is going “web 2.0″ with their new modernista.com destination. I think this has to be the gutsiest web strategy I’ve seen, specially when considering it’s from an ad agency.

When users “Google” the agency and click on Modernista, they are brought to the same results page — with an added nav bar. Clicking on “About” brings you to either Modernista’s Wikipedia entry or Facebook page.

The agency’s past work appears on Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us. For company news, users are directed to Google News.

As MarketingVox points out, it’s risky as it means that competitors and potentially disgruntled ex-customers might have a way to place negative information within their web destination. You have to give them credit for walking the walk when it comes to the web.

I’m taking a week off from Marketing and web to develop some new skills — being a dad! The boy and mom are both healthy.

Interesting results via NBC about video ad memorability:

Advertising in programs streamed online has a better rate of recall and is preferred by users to similar ads served on TV, according to new research from NBC.

It’s a no brainer — stop stuffing ads down consumer’s throats and make the ads more relevant — you’ll get better results.

“NBC.com’s loyal users actively navigate and curate their own experience in NBC Rewind, so there is a high level of engagement,” Peter Naylor, SVP for digital media sales at NBCU, told TV Week.

Good news on the browser war front. Finaly!

For many web developers, Microsoft’s decision to make IE 8 conform to standards used by other browsers will go a long way toward making the web work better.

Microsoft’s current browser, IE 7, came under fire from some web developers because it handles web page code differently than Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and other browsers. The lack of standards between browsers confounded developers and forced some to create two different versions of the same website.

This should go a long way to make the web user-experience a little better, and reduce the costs of web development.

I just visited the new Hyundai Hispanic marketing website and was very disappointed. Not only was the site boring, but it took me 5 minutes to figure out the navigation — clever, but way to complicated.

The site lacks visuals, of all things! I didn’t see a single picture of a shiny new Hyundai. The copy was good, but why, oh why, would they not use images or video? I mean, buying a car is a cultural and emotional experience, and there is no better way to communicate that but through visuals. Even when checking the “design” section — nothing — No pictures, no colors, no videos.

I don’t know who LatinWorks/Austin is hiring these days, but someone there should know this! Time to move on to a fourth option…

The company has a new head of multicultural marketing and is riding its third Hispanic agency in less than three years.

I visited LatinWorks site, (beware of the urban music on their splash page…) and immediately you can see that their Flash animator has a love for words and animated lines.

Hyundai’s new Hispanic slogan is “Discover it for yourself” but all I did was read about it… They missed the opportunity to provide their customers a truly interactive discovery process through the power of the web.

I haven’t seen the TV spots, so I won’t include those in this critique, but as far as the website, not effective use of marketing dollars, if you ask me.